Related Subjects: Author Index
Book reviews for "Bramah,_Ernest" sorted by average review score:

Wallet of Kai Lung
Published in Paperback by House of Fire Pr (November, 1988)
Author: Ernest Bramah
Amazon base price: $8.00
Used price: $10.00
Average review score:

This humble reviewer can not possibly do this book justice..
Bramah sure can spin a phrase. The book is a collection of stories told by Kai Lung, and as such is excellent. You are transported back into this fictional China, where introductions can take hours as the two people flatter each other & humble themselves endlessly. The stories are very amusing, but be forewarned; the language takes some time to read through & comprehend. Not a book to breeze through (but oh so rewarding when you do read it!)

Truely great book
The Kai Lung books have a nice dry humour, a beautifully way of turning a phrase and a concoluted way of using the english language. It is a China that never was but really ought to have been.


Kai Lung's Golden Hours
Published in Hardcover by Indypublish.Com (June, 2002)
Author: Ernest Bramah
Amazon base price: $94.99
Average review score:

You are too unworthy to read this most excellent book
I tried to write my comments on Ernest Bramagh's Kai Lung's Golden Hours, which I just finished, in the same style:

In the opinion of this lowly reader, the esteemed author before our unworthy eyes has created a gem of the highest quality, polished by fine craft.

But you can only do this so long before you get frustrated, which is why you have to admire Bramagh, because he could maintain this oblique and ornate style throughout and still manage to tell a compelling and, more than often, extremely humorous story.

The titular character, Kai Lung, is a storyteller who runs afoul of the local authorities, in particular a rather nasty advisor. The problem is that Kai has set his eyes on a most beautiful young woman who is also highly desired by the advisor, and the mandarin in charge is quite corrupt. The one saving grace for Kai Lung is that the mandarin also likes a good story. Like Scherazade, Kai Lung is therefore in the positive of entertaining for his life, and that he is able to accomplish this is not due to the fragment of 1001 stories available to him, but also the help of his beloved (a fairly strong female character given the situation and the date this was written, 1922).

Not everyone will care for this book, because a style as circular and dense as this doesn't lead itself to the short-attention-span-generation (only James Branch Cabell has a more elaborate, yet beautiful, prose form in fantasy). I don't know what it was about the 1920s that enabled the creation of such great comedy (Bramagh, Cabell, P.G. Wodehouse [who first became popular as a novelist in the 1920s], Thorne Smith). Maybe it was the post-War jubiliation, the underground of prohibition, or the pre-Depression stockmarket? Not ours to wonder why, but just to enjoy and laugh.

The kind of good reading that mass media displaced
If you're here for the first time, then you have my sympathy on learning that this book is out of print. It's time for a re-issue--are you listening, Penguin Classics?

These stories are about a wandering storyteller, who gets into various jams and escapes with the aid of his silver tongue and an admiring coquette. For someone who apparently never visited China, and never even met that many Chinese, the verisimilitude Bramah achieves is amazing. This is an English child's storybook China, yet the stories themselves richly delight adults, too. The scene-setting is wonderful, but the real gem is the dialogue. Suave, sly, elliptically ceremonious, mock-abnegating--but you really have to read it to catch the flavor. Hillaire Belloc's introduction is on the money about how deceptively easy this style looks, and it is a great pity that more people do not have the opportunity to enjoy this and the other Kai Lung works today.

May your sleeves be filled with a sufficiency of taels, and may hungry and homeless ghosts find solace at your house-pole, and preserve your family tablets from the mischiefs of the lesser orders of the beings of the Upper Air...

There's just one thing to say....
The earlier reviewers of this book have said everything there is to say (and much better than I could have said it). I am the lucky possessor of a collected volume of all the Kai Lung stories. After having read Kai Lung's golden hours and the other books in the series, there was just one thing felt : a sense of profound sadness that there isn't more of Kai Lung to read!


The Secret Of The League
Published in Paperback by Specular Press (April, 1995)
Authors: Ernest Bramah and Daniel Jencka
Amazon base price: $12.95
Used price: $17.60
Average review score:
No reviews found.

Best Max Carrados Detective Stories
Published in Paperback by Dover Pubns (October, 1972)
Authors: Ernest Bramah Smith, Ernest Bramah, and Everett F. Bleiler
Amazon base price: $5.95
Used price: $2.98
Collectible price: $2.25
Average review score:
No reviews found.

Kai Lung Beneath the Mulberry-Tree (Lost Race and Adult Fantasy Fiction)
Published in Hardcover by Ayer Co Pub (June, 1978)
Author: Ernest Bramah
Amazon base price: $28.95
Average review score:
No reviews found.

Kai Lung Unrol His Mat
Published in Mass Market Paperback by Ballantine Books (January, 1974)
Authors: Ernest Bramah and Ernest Bramah Smith
Amazon base price: $1.25
Used price: $4.50
Collectible price: $5.50
Average review score:
No reviews found.

Max Carrados
Published in Textbook Binding by Garland Pub (June, 1976)
Author: Ernest Bramah Smith
Amazon base price: $22.00
Used price: $14.99
Average review score:
No reviews found.

The Mirror of Kong Ho
Published in Paperback by Indypublish.Com (July, 2002)
Author: Ernest Bramah
Amazon base price: $88.99
Average review score:
No reviews found.

The Mysteries of Max Carrados
Published in Audio Cassette by Mr Punch Audio Books (19 May, 1997)
Authors: Ernest Bramah, Simon Callow, Lionel Jeffries, Stephen Tompkinson, and Sue Rodwell
Amazon base price: $
Average review score:
No reviews found.

Related Subjects: Author Index

Reviews are from readers at Amazon.com. To add a review, follow the Amazon buy link above.